Integration of Social Context vs. Linguistic Reference During Situated Language Processing

Research findings on language comprehension suggest that many kinds of non-linguistic cues can rapidly affect language processing. Extant processing accounts of situated language comprehension model these rapid effects and are only beginning to accommodate the role of non-linguistic emotional, cues. To begin with a detailed characterization of distinct cues and their relative effects, three visual-world eye-tracking experiments assessed the relative importance of two cue types (action depictions vs. emotional facial expressions) as well as the effects of the degree of naturalness of social (facial) cues (smileys vs. natural faces). We predicted to replicate previously reported rapid effects of referentially mediated actions. In addition, we assessed distinct world-language relations. If how a cue is conveyed matters for its effect, then a verb referencing an action depiction should elicit a stronger immediate effect on visual attention and language comprehension than a speaker's emotional facial expression. The latter is mediated non-referentially via the emotional connotations of an adverb. The results replicated a pronounced facilitatory effect of action depiction (relative to no action depiction). By contrast, the facilitatory effect of a preceding speaker's emotional face was less pronounced. How the facial emotion was rendered mattered in that the emotional face effect was present with natural faces (Experiment 2) but not with smileys (Experiment 1). Experiment 3 suggests that contrast, i.e., strongly opposing emotional valence information vs. non-opposing valence information, might matter for the directionality of this effect. These results are the first step toward a more principled account of how distinct visual (social) cues modulate language processing, whereby the visual cues that are referenced by language (the depicted action), copresent (the depicted action), and more natural (the natural emotional prime face) tend to exert more pronounced effects.

Toward an accommodation account of deaccenting under nonidentity

Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent-nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listeners’ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material to be deaccented. We argue that these results are more compatible with the accommodation model of deaccenting licensing, which allows for differential licensing of deaccentuation on inferable versus repeated constituents and provides a principled account of the sensitivity of accentuation preferences on inferable material to broader contextual manipulations.

Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy

In the final parts of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, he presents his vision for a just and more equal society. This vision marks an alternative to contemporary societies, and differs radically both from the planned Soviet economies and from social democratic welfare states. In his sketch of this vision, Piketty provides a principled account of how such a society would look and how it would modify the current status of private property through co-managed enterprises and the creation of temporary ownership models. He also sets out two principles for when inequalities are just. The first principle permits inequalities that are beneficial to the worst-off, while the second permits inequalities that reflect differences in people’s choices and ambitions. This article identifies a tension between Piketty’s two inequality-permitting principles. It also argues that the procedural limits on how decisions are made within the enterprises of participatory socialism might create inequalities not permitted by the guiding distributive principles of participatory socialism. This tension points to the need for either further changes in firm structure and ownership, an even more progressive taxation scheme, or an egalitarian ethos reflected in citizens’ choices in their everyday lives under participatory socialism.

On event-denoting deadjectival nominalizations

This paper offers a principled account for the nominalizations of dispositional evaluative adjectives. On the descriptive side, the paper shows that (i) in addition to the largely studied deverbal nominalizations, certain deadjectival nominalizations can also refer to events; (ii) the types of adjectives that enable eventive denotation are of a specific sort, namely, those deriving from Dispositional Evaluative Adjectives (e.g., imprudent). At the theoretical level, this paper argues that (i) dispositional deadjectival nominalizations introduce an event description not in a head but in a specifier position, as their subject of predication; (ii) in order for a word to have functional structure of the sort associated to verbs, an event description is not enough: functional projections must form a head-sequence with the event-descriptive heads; without this configuration, the merge of a fully-fledged verbal functional structure is blocked, which explains the limitations regarding temporal modification; (iii) The event present in the dispositional deadjectival nominalizations is a partial event description consisting of a head referring to the Process subevent.

Clitics in embryo

The chapter aims to provide a principled account of the emergence of clitic pronouns in the transition from Latin to early Romance. The discussion revolves around the hypothesis that a double series of pronouns (which in Late Latin were still homophonous) emerged from the reanalysis of a discourse-driven displacement. So-called weak pronouns in Latin are strong pronouns that are displaced to the Wackernagel Position, which is analysed as a Criterial Position in the sense of Rizzi (2006, 2007). Productive interpolation in medieval Portuguese and Spanish results from the same syntactic displacement, but the Romance languages, unlike Latin, have exhibited a double series of pronouns (clitic/strong) from the earliest attestations. The emergence of a second series of pronouns witnesses a change in the morphophonological status of pronouns, which is the prelude to another change which will yield the incorporation of clitics into verbal hosts.

Getting stuck in a rut as an emergent feature of a dynamic decision-making system

Human sensorimotor decision-making has a tendency to get ‘stuck in a rut’, being biased towards selecting a previously implemented action structure (‘hysteresis’). Existing explanations cannot provide a principled account of when hysteresis will occur. We propose that hysteresis is an emergent property of a dynamical system learning from the consequences of its actions. To examine this, 152 participants moved a cursor to a target on a tablet device whilst avoiding an obstacle. Hysteresis was observed when the obstacle moved sequentially across the screen between trials, but not with random obstacle placement. Two further experiments (n = 20) showed an attenuation when time and resource constraints were eased. We created a simple computational model capturing dynamic probabilistic estimate updating that showed the same patterns of results. This provides the first computational demonstration of how sensorimotor decision-making can get ‘stuck in a rut’ through the dynamic updating of its probability estimates.Significance StatementHumans show a bias to select the organisational structure of a recently carried out action, even when an alternative option is available with lower costs. This ‘hysteresis’ is said to be more efficient than creating a new plan and it has been interpreted as a ‘design feature’ within decision-making systems. We suggest such teleological arguments are redundant, with hysteresis being a naturally emergent property of a dynamic control system that evolved to operate effectively in an uncertain and partially observable world. Empirical experimentation and simulations from a ‘first principle’ computational model of decision-making were consistent with our hypothesis. The identification of such a mechanism can inform robotics research, suggesting how robotic agents can show human-like flexibility in complex dynamic environments.

Degeneracy and Redundancy in Active Inference

The notions of degeneracy and redundancy are important constructs in many areas, ranging from genomics through to network science. Degeneracy finds a powerful role in neuroscience, explaining key aspects of distributed processing and structure–function relationships in the brain. For example, degeneracy accounts for the superadditive effect of lesions on functional deficits in terms of a “many-to-one” structure–function mapping. In this paper, we offer a principled account of degeneracy and redundancy, when function is operationalized in terms of active inference, namely, a formulation of perception and action as belief updating under generative models of the world. In brief, “degeneracy” is quantified by the “entropy” of posterior beliefs about the causes of sensations, while “redundancy” is the “complexity” cost incurred by forming those beliefs. From this perspective, degeneracy and redundancy are complementary: Active inference tries to minimize redundancy while maintaining degeneracy. This formulation is substantiated using statistical and mathematical notions of degenerate mappings and statistical efficiency. We then illustrate changes in degeneracy and redundancy during the learning of a word repetition task. Finally, we characterize the effects of lesions—to intrinsic and extrinsic connections—using in silico disconnections. These numerical analyses highlight the fundamental difference between degeneracy and redundancy—and how they score distinct imperatives for perceptual inference and structure learning that are relevant to synthetic and biological intelligence.

The role of ambiguity in child errors

This chapter compares two contrasting approaches to accounting for the verb placement errors in child Swiss German that are described in Schönenberger (2001). The first is a learning model that captures the errors because it both learns from ambiguous input and has a rich hypothesis space of interacting parameters (Gould 2017). The second captures the errors instead by means of a cognitive bias early in development, namely a heuristic for Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (cf. Futrell et al. 2015). The latter approach is notable in that it (a) does not rely on learning from ambiguous input to capture child errors (cf. Sakas and Fodor 2001), (b) offers a prima facie simpler way of capturing the errors, and (c) is novel in applying DLM to account for child errors. Nevertheless, closer investigation shows that a DLM-based model does not provide a principled account of the children’s developmental trajectory and is clearly not any simpler than the alternative. Further, there is some reason to think more generally that DLM does not play a role in the development of the Swiss German children during the course of Schönenberger’s study. In contrast, an approach based on parameter interaction does provide the desired principled account. This comparison provides support for a non-biased learning model that has parameter interaction and learns from ambiguous input.

Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Layered Structure of PP

This chapter provides a novel observation concerning cross-linguistic variation regarding NP-ellipsis (henceforth NPE) inside articulated PPs and considers its theoretical implications. It first shows that although NPE is equally available in nominals in English, Chinese, and Japanese, the parallel pattern breaks down when NPE takes place within PPs. This study proposes a principled account of the cross-linguistic variation in question on the basis of (i) the layered internal structure of PPs, (ii) the syntactic reflection of fusional/non-fusional case morphology, and (iii) a phase-based analysis of ellipsis. The proposed analysis correctly predicts not only the availability of NPE within PPs but also one without PPs in English, Chinese, and Japanese. This chapter also provides theoretical implications for the role of phases in ellipsis and the cross-linguistic differences in nominal morphology.

Why Does Space Feel the Way it Does? Towards a Principled Account of Spatial Experience

There must be a reason why an experience feels the way it does. A good place to begin addressing this question is spatial experience, because it may be more penetrable by introspection than other qualities of consciousness such as color or pain. Moreover, much of experience is spatial, from that of our body to the visual world, which appears as if painted on an extended canvas in front of our eyes. Because it is ‘right there’, we usually take space for granted and overlook its qualitative properties. However, we should realize that a great number of phenomenal distinctions and relations are required for the canvas of space to feel ‘extended’. Here we argue that, to be experienced as extended, the canvas of space must be composed of countless spots, here and there, small and large, and these spots must be related to each other in a characteristic manner through connection, fusion, and inclusion. Other aspects of the structure of spatial experience follow from extendedness: every spot can be experienced as enclosing a particular region, with its particular location, size, boundary, and distance from other spots. We then propose an account of the phenomenal properties of spatial experiences based on integrated information theory (IIT). The theory provides a principled approach for characterizing both the quantity and quality of experience by unfolding the cause-effect structure of a physical substrate. Specifically, we show that a simple simulated substrate of units connected in a grid-like manner yields a cause-effect structure whose properties can account for the main properties of spatial experience. These results uphold the hypothesis that our experience of space is supported by brain areas whose units are linked by a grid-like connectivity. They also predict that changes in connectivity, even in the absence of changes in activity, should lead to a warping of experienced space. To the extent that this approach provides an initial account of phenomenal space, it may also serve as a starting point for investigating other aspects of the quality of experience and their physical correspondents.